So, you all remember my rant about how the new WoW.com holy paladin columnist insists that paladins are tank healers, right? Where I was saying that no, we’re single-target healers and that tank healing is a subset of single-target healing?
Great post here at Divine Plea that tells us that we’re single-target healers.
Last night, my guild worked on Sindragosa. It was a challenging fight for a variety of reasons (my RL friend couldn’t make it due to RL issues, so we were without the healing lead and our best healer) and it was specifically challenging for me because I got beaned by Blistering Cold a few times, but having prepared myself for the fight, I had already decided to Beacon whichever tank was tanking so I could help out on the raid if needed. Why? Because although I don’t enjoy raid healing very much, it’s the best use of my beacon in the situation. Everyone is taking constant AOE frost damage, people are randomly taking melee or caster debuff damage, so there’s a LOT of raid damage going on. And, due to the placement of the tank vs. the melee, there’s not a lot of opportunity for Glyph of Holy Light to see much action.
So I did a fair amount of raid healing with my beacon on the tank. I really do much prefer to beacon the OT and heal the MT, or vice-versa, just because that way, it leaves me able to really focus on my one target, and I LIKE that. I don’t think paladin healing is boring like that. Some people do and really relish the idea of beaconing their tank and raid healing the way I did on Sindragosa last night and that’s cool. There are certainly a lot of fights where my preferred use of Beacon is how we do it in my guild and there are a few fights where we switch it up a bit.
Another example is Rotface. What we had done for our first few kills (and then refined it a bit, but now that I’m the only holy paladin in the guild, we may revert) is have me beacon the MT and heal the crap out of the people with the infection. I HAVE to drop huge heals on them because of the healing debuff on them, and those all get transferred to the tank, so it works nicely. Of course, there will be another healer on the MT specifically, but it works out okay.
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that post at Divine Plea, which I stumbled across due to Miss Medicina’s post.